Nine-year editor of Walker magazine (1998-2007), Paul returned to the Walker as web editor in September 2011. A freelance writer and blogger, he writes on art, media, and activism for publications including Adbusters, Artforum.com, Ode, Utne, Cabinet, Raw Vision and at his personal site, Eyeteeth. Award-winning former editor of the Minnesota Independent, his interviews with architect Cameron Sinclair, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and activist Winona La Duke appear in the book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Royal Society of Arts).
@iteeth

It’s been seven years since we launched the Walker Blogs, and with the release of our new homepage back in December we thought it was finally time for a refresh. Formerly called Off Center, Centerpoints changes this blog’s mission. Now that we’re aggregating the best of news about art and culture on our website’s new […]

It’s been seven years since we launched the Walker Blogs, and with the release of our new homepage back in December we thought it was finally time for a refresh. Formerly called Off Center, Centerpoints changes this blog’s mission. Now that we’re aggregating the best of news about art and culture on our website’s new Art News From Elsewhere feature, we have less need for a blog that brings–as Off Center‘s tagline once read–“outside ideas from inside the Walker.” What we do need is a space to share ideas about the Walker that transcend our artistic disciplines or address the center as a whole. Now you’ll find cross-departmental news and updates on our neighborhood, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the Shop and restaurant, and our staff. In addition to a new name, we have a new design, which brings our blogs into alignment with the new Walker homepage. All of our core blogs have new names and identities as well, so check them out to get the latest on what’s going on in our Design, Education & Community Programs, Film/Video, Performing Arts, Visual Arts, and New Media departments, as well as at the mnartists.org blog and Walker Seen, our new blog geared toward making the social seen.

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• Taking a keen interest in caring for feral cats, photographer Sandy Carson set out to document the people and processes related to TNR (Trap-Neuter-Return). “You don’t have to be a crazy ‘cat person’ to be a certified trapper,” he assures, “but cat attire is optional.” • Here’s 4 minutes 33 seconds worth of clips […]

• Here’s 4 minutes 33 seconds worth of clips of a non-speaking Nicholas Cage in which only ambient noises are audible. Created by Adam Lucas, Cage Does Cage is an homage to John Cage’s 1952 conceptual art piece 4‘33”, performed by the Ghostrider star.

• A new edition of Lewis Carroll’s surreal fable Alice in Wonderland is, aptly, designed by an artist known for creating mind-bending visual worlds. Penguin Global has just published aYayoi Kusama-designed version of the 1865 tale.

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• We’re up for a Webby! The nominees list for the 2012 Webby People’s Voice Awards—honoring the best of the web—has just been released, and the Walker’s “gamechanging” new website makes the cut, in the category of best art site. Voting is open to the public through April 26. • “A casual treatment of death […]

• After being slapped with a 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) penalty for alleged tax-law violations, Ai Weiwei is suing Chinese authorities. He argues that the fine for tax evasion was unlawful, as he wasn’t given access to witnesses or evidence used against him.

• For their first solo show in London, art provocateurs Eva and Franco Mattes—aka 0100101110101101.org—present a show with a title that changes daily and offers a display of works the duo claims includes fragments stolen from masterworks by Duchamp, Warhol, and others. “A lot of the works were so crazy, strong and powerful when they were made, like Duchamp’s Fountain, but became so accepted and it was like energy had been sucked out of them by being put in a museum,” the pair said. “The work maybe dies a little bit. We consider what we did a tribute to these artists – it is like a medieval relic, you keep it because you want to protect it and preserve it. We were acting out of faith, not anger.”

• There’s nothing like Minneapolis’ Minnehaha Falls in springtime, writes Andy Sturdevant, who shares a photo from an 1983 visit there by Jorge Luis Borges. Wrote the late Argentine poet:

The wry mythology of the Wisconsin and Minnesota lumber camps includes remarkable creatures – creatures that no one, surely, has ever believed in. The Pinnacle Grouse had just one wing, so it could only fly in one direction, and it flew around one particular mountain day and night. The color of its plumage would change depending on the season and the condition of the observer.

• Damien Hirst’s sculpture Hymn, installed outside Tate Modern, was tagged with the word “Occupy” after a writer at The Occupied Times of Londonidentified him as “the man who has defined the capitalist approach to art more than any other.” Kester Brewin writes:

Sharks. Death. Love. God. Money. If Hirst is anything, he is the brash Goldman Sachs of the art world. He has a vast personal fortune of over £200m, accumulated through an alchemy that would leave even the most brash bankers in awe: stock medicine cabinets, spots of paint, flies, butterflies and severed cows heads transformed into pieces that sell for millions.

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• After being disqualified from his own presidential run, singer Youssou Ndour finds himself in politics nonetheless: He’s been named Senegal’s new minister for culture and tourism. The Grammy winner is part of new president Macky Sall’s cabinet. • Andrew Bird, Laurie Anderson, and Amadou & Mariam are among artists invited to perform in A […]

• After being disqualified from his own presidential run, singer Youssou Ndour finds himself in politics nonetheless: He’s been named Senegal’s new minister for culture and tourism. The Grammy winner is part of new president Macky Sall’s cabinet.

• Andrew Bird, Laurie Anderson, and Amadou & Mariam are among artists invited to perform in A Room For London, a small “boat” overlooking the Thames. Winning a design contest, Fiona Banner’s proposal is based on the boat Joseph Conrad captained in the Congo in 1890.

• The “Contact & News” page of Richard Prince’s website has turned into a blog, of sorts. The artist has been musing since March on topics from his reading recommendations (Mary’s Mosaic by Peter Janney) to hairy women to his wonderment about Victor Hugo’s real name.

• For former urban planner Kathryn Clark, charts and statistics on foreclosures fail to convey the hardship so many families are facing. Her Foreclosure Quilts are delicate fabric collages that tell the story of our fraying neighborhoods.

• A new single-theme Tumblr by Jason Foumberg aims to catalog the last works made by famous artists. A few poetic inclusions: Keith Haring‘s Unfinished Painting of 1989, Paul Thek‘s Dust (1988), and Basquiat‘s 1988 work Riding with Death.

• On Sunday, Philadelphia announced it’d be the first American city to create “E-Lanes,” delineated Electronic Device Lanes reserved for those who chronically walk and text. John Metcalfe dubs it one of 2012’s best April Fool’s joke by a US city.

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• In a “heartwarming display of New York crankiness,” Chuck Close grumbled about the trade of vocally Christian quarterback Tim Tebow to the Jets. “He’s going to be in the end zone praying? This is New York. He should go do that in, uh, the Midwest somewhere.” • Shepard Fairey, who was asked by Penguin […]

• In a “heartwarming display of New York crankiness,” Chuck Close grumbled about the trade of vocally Christian quarterback Tim Tebow to the Jets. “He’s going to be in the end zone praying? This is New York. He should go do that in, uh, the Midwest somewhere.”

• Noted performance artist Alison Knowles will stage her landmark Fluxus score Make a Salad (1962) on New York’s High Line for an April 22 commemoration of Earth Day.

• Screenshots of Despair: “Let’s get the crowd involved in documenting these weird, almost accidental moments, when the default algorithms that undergird the realm of the connected remind us, quietly but somewhat naggingly, that we’re all alone.”

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• In addition to being surrealism’s mustachioed poster child, Salvador Dalí had his side gigs doing commercial work—like the iconic daisy logo for Chupa Chups, the popular Spanish lollipops, he made in 1969. • For the Brooklyn Museum’s Keith Haring show, opening Mar. 16, the late artist’s foundation has been scanning pages from his journal. […]

• Spanish collective Boa Mistura recently led a “typographic intervention” with residents in the São Paulo favela of Vila Brâsilandia. Playing tricks with perspective, they made words like “sweetness” and “tenacity” appear to float above the winding pathways.

• GIFs have come a long way since 1987, when the web-based image format brought us animated flames and “Under Construction” signs. Today, as PBS tracks, they’re the basis of a new kind of art, with Tumblr and Reddit helping to spread GIF-based memes.

• Sculptor Richard Serradeveloped a “union solidarity” working in a steel mill as a teenager. “That’s never left me, the notion of the effort the working class puts in every day,” he tells Tyler Green. “The split in the country right now is not good for either class.”

• Chattanooga, Tennessee, sees itself on the rebound, with a boom in arts and industry. Designers Robbie de Villiers and Jeremy Dooley think they can telegraph these gains with a custom-designed typeface for the city: Chatype.

• An “ebullient, graphic, homoerotic, black-and-white” mural made by Keith Haring in the former mensroom of New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in 1989 is open to the public all month long following a $25,000 conservation effort.

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• Tobias Leingruber has shut down FBbureau.com, a satirical art project in which he proposed official Facebook ID cards, after the online giant had its lawyers send him a cease-and-desist letter claiming trademark infringement. • “You can use an object as a sculpture, but also you can also smash a window with it, or break […]

• Ikea is teaming up with Oregon-based architectural firm Ideabox to get into the prefab housing business. The Swedish-themed one-bedroom abode, which has a design focused on efficient space use, will retail for just shy of $87,000.

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• “The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing,” says Laurie Anderson in an interview with The Believer. “You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.” • When Chris Burden’s Metropolis, a kinetic sculpture/mini-cityscape, opens at LACMA on Saturday, […]

• “The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing,” says Laurie Anderson in an interview with The Believer. “You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.”

• For a show opening in New Delhi Friday, Yoko Ono has produced new versions of the WAR IS OVER! poster she created with John Lennon in 1968. Now translated into 108 languages (including Klingon), the series’ newest additions include Telugu, Urdu, Tamil (pictured), and Kannada.

•Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms” get a motherly tweak in a spoof Twitter account, @JennyHolzerMom. A sampling: “BEAUTY IS A MOVING TARGET BUT SWEETIE THAT IS A LOT OF EYE MAKEUP.”

• “The revolution brought everybody’s talents into light. People started to talk from their hearts,’ says Egyptian musician Shaimaa Shaalan in a forthcoming documentary about the post-revolution arts boom. Here’s the trailer.

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As you may have gathered, I’m a dog guy. But seeing as the internet is especially fond of cats, we’ve been doing a weekly (more or less) nod to feline fanciers in the Walker homepage’s Art News From Elsewhere section. Our art-linked Friday Cat Breaks have shown us Ai Weiwei’s cats; the increasingly abstracted cat […]

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• Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Steve Jobs: These are some of the figures Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro use in their face-substitution experiment, which uses face-tracking technology and color interpolation to create creepy mashup visages. • David Hockney confirms: Language on posters for his Royal Academy of Arts show are a dig at Damien Hirst. […]

• Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Steve Jobs: These are some of the figures Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro use in their face-substitution experiment, which uses face-tracking technology and color interpolation to create creepy mashup visages.

• Once controversial, Zbigniew Libera‘s 1996 artwork rendering of a concentration camp in Legos has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which dubbed it “one of the most important works of contemporary Polish art.”

• It’s important “to situate an institution as a civically engaged place that has a stake in the political–or even just empathetic, compassionate–constellation of a city,” says Dan Byers, associate curator of the Carnegie International and former Walker curator.

• An art student has Banksied the Polish National Museum, sneaking one of his portraits onto the wall in imitation of the UK street artist. “I decided that I will not wait 30 or 40 years for my works to appear at a place like this,” he said.